1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Scientists confirm supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy

By

It has been suspected for some time that there is a supermassive black hole located at the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A*. Now scientists have uncovered more evidence about the black hole which they shared in an announcement on October 31.

Cosmologists have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe flares of infrared radiation from the disk of debris surrounding Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-Star), which is strong evidence that it is a supermassive black hole. A consortium of scientists at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) used the GRAVITY telescope interferometer to observe three bright flares orbiting around Sagittarius A* at a tremendous speed of 30 percent of the speed of light. The flares are believed to be caused by the heated gases that orbit Sagittarius A* which interact with the magnetic fields surrounding them, and are in line with what scientists predicted would be seen around a black hole.

Recommended Videos

ESO released a video which shows a beautiful visualization of zooming into the black hole and seeing the swirling pattern of the flares that surround it:

Zooming into Sagittarius A*

This is the first time that material has been observed so close to the event horizon of a black hole. The event horizon is a region around a black hole from which nothing can escape — not matter or even light. Because black holes are so dense, they have very strong gravity which pulls anything within the event horizon back towards the black hole and prevents it from escaping. Just outside of the event horizon is a point called the innermost stable orbit, which is the closest that matter can come to the black hole without being dragged into it, and this is where the flares observed by the ESO originated. The innermost stable orbit is part of the accretion disk, which is the disk of gasses and other matter that forms around a black hole but which is far enough away not to be pulled inside the event horizon. The forces of friction and gravity combine to compress these gases and raise their temperature, which is how the flares form.

As a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* is even stronger than most black holes due to its enormous size. We now have confirmation that this cosmological giant is the center around which the entire Milky Way galaxy rotates.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
See a map of 25,000 supermassive black holes in distant galaxies

Sky map showing 25,000 supermassive black holes. Each white dot is a supermassive black hole in its own galaxy. LOFAR/LOL Survey

It might look like a map of stars, but that's not what is shown in the image above. Instead, each dot on this map of the night sky represents an enormous black hole called a supermassive black hole, each in a different distant galaxy.

Read more
Misbehaving ‘baby’ black holes could cause strange brightening of radio galaxies

The radio galaxy Hercules A has an active supermassive black hole at its center. Here it is pictured emitting high energy particles in jets expanding out into radio lobes. NASA/ESA/NRAO

The more we learn about black holes, the more mysterious they seem to be. A new study has looked at "baby" supermassive black holes, which lie at the heart of young galaxies, and found that they may be misbehaving in intriguing ways.

Read more
These scientists have a wildly futuristic plan to harvest energy from black holes

Could black holes be harvested to provide power for future off-planet colonies? It sounds -- and, in some ways, certainly is -- pretty far-fetched. But, according to researchers from Columbia University and Chile’s Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, it’s also possible. At least, theoretically.

“Imagine two parts of charged matter around a rotating black hole,” Felipe Asenjo, Professor of Physics at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, told Digital Trends. “If they are in the right place, and they are pushed apart at a speed that is close to the speed of light, then one part will fall into the black hole, while the other one will gain energy escaping from it.”

Read more